Category: Karl Popper

Hayek, Karl Popper, neoliberalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of SCience, political philosophy, Truth

Snippet: Fuzzy, Uncertain Nature
Lotfi Zadeh, inventor of fuzzy logic, who died earlier this month at the age of 96.

I’ve long had an idea about the curved nature of things, the non-binary natural order. This is not the same as relativism versus absolutism, which is one sense a binary opposition in itself; rather, it is a straight acknowledgement that truth is never fully observable, that is it at least always subjective, and that even in the subjective moment it is mutable. What I see may not be what you see; and what I see is inconstant. Time impacts on that observation such that its character is unstable. Take pain and pleasure, for example. While on the one hand some people take a kind of satisfaction from pain, and are attracted to it, whether physical or emotional, so too others recoil from pleasure, perhaps based on guilt, or other psychological alignments. Still further, the same act – a touch – can bring immediate pleasure, while the same act, more forcefully applied, can either increase the pleasure or turn at some point to pain.  Continue reading “Snippet: Fuzzy, Uncertain Nature” →

Democracy, Karl Popper, Philosophy, political philosophy, science fiction

The General Will And Predictive Analytics
We_first_ed_dust_jacket
Zamyatin’s hero D-503 seemed quite pleased with his personal dystopia.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 work The Social Contract is in many respects an answer to his earlier work on inequality from 1754. In his discourse on inequality, he elaborated on the concept of amour propre, from which all inequality derived.  This amounted to a kind of egotism, or self-love of a particular kind, not what he calls amour de soi-meme, or love of oneself, which is a more visceral, base, defensiveness or protectiveness. The amour de soi-meme is a natural basis for self-preservation, much one could say as the spikes on a porcupine represent that animal’s amour de soi-meme.  The amour propre is the basis, he says, for honour, deriving as it does from a sense of esteem, something that is relative (to other people) and created by society.  Hobbesian vainglory, Platonic thumos, Freudian egoism, even Nietzschian supremacism – there are other incarnations of this concept, and in responding as he did in the Social Contract to this particularly human (and male) characteristic in The Social Contract, Rousseau extended the concept in The General Will. Continue reading “The General Will And Predictive Analytics” →

Karl Popper, Philosophy, social media

Karl Popper, and Social Probability

I’ve not read much of Popper, a failing I’m looking to rectify soon.  However, one snippit has intrigued me – his assertion that if we can predict a solar eclipse, then we should be able to predict revolutions.  Saying that, I’m not entirely sure if it was an assertion (“…we should be…”) or a question (“…should we be…”).  Nevertheless, our excess of instrumentation today through the integrated digital tooling of everything means that we can measure more than ever before.  With social media, an appropriate big data infrastructure with cutting edge sentiment analytics should be able to measure the pulse of a people.  That’s an experiment I’d like to set up some day, and hopefully I’ll get the time to do it.

Continue reading “Karl Popper, and Social Probability” →